The term Timbuktu Manuscripts applies to 700,000 medieval African documents, ranging from scholarly works to short letters, that have been preserved by private households in Timbuktu. The manuscripts were passed down in Timbuktu families and are mostly in poor condition.[1] Some of the manuscripts date back to the 13th century. [2]
Medieval manuscripts are not thought of as very useful in Timbuktu. Many are being sold off.[3] Time magazine related the account of an imam who picked up four of them for $50 each. In October 2008 one of the households was flooded, destroying 700 manuscripts.[4]
The majority of Manuscripts are in Arabic or in African languages written in Arabic script or Africanized versions of the Arabic alphabets, collectively called "Ajami script". These manuscripts deal with a wide variety of subjects including Islam, Astronomy, Law and even Contracts.[5]
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In 1970, UNESCO founded an organization which included among its tasks preservation of the manuscripts, but it went unfunded until 1977.[6] In 1998, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates visited Timbuktu for his PBS series Wonders of the African World. The series raised public and academic awareness of the manuscripts, which led to a pool of funding opening up.[7]
The Timbuktu Manuscripts Project was a project of the University of Oslo running from 2000 to 2007, the goal of which was to secure and preserve the manuscripts.[8] It was funded by the government of Luxembourg[9] alongside with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the Ford Foundation, the Norwegian Council for Higher Education's Programme for Development Research and Education (NUFU), and the United States Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation. It did not publish any results.
The Tombouctou Manuscripts Project is a separate project run by the University of Cape Town. In a partnership with the government of South Africa, this project is the first official cultural project of the New Partnership for Africa's Development. It was founded in 2003 and is ongoing. They released a report on the project in 2008.[10] As well as preserving the manuscripts, the Cape Town project also aims to make access to public and private libraries around Timbuktu more widely available. The project's online database is accessible to researchers only.
A 2008 book about Timbuktu contains a chapter with some discussions of a few of the texts.[11]
A movie about the project, The Ancient Astronomers of Timbuktu, was released in 2009, with funding from the Ford Foundation and Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.[12]
Thirty-two manuscripts from the area are available from the United States Library of Congress;[13] a subset of these are also accessible from the United Nations' World Digital Library website.[14] It is unclear if these manuscripts are related to either of the projects described here.